Sapphire HD5670 Flex Edition Review – low cost multiscreen productivity

For this review today we are using a budget oriented system based around AMD's Fusion platform. We have covered Fusion technology in recent months, and we felt that this particular system build could not only highlight AMD's latest low power platform, but give indications of possible performance related improvements by adding a discrete FleX card to the system. Obviously this motherboard can only handle 4x bandwidth via the PCI-E slot, but we have found that even with this limitation, discrete cards are vastly superior to the onboard graphics.

The added benefit is that this specific card doesn't require any power PCI-E connectors, so a very low power PSU can handle the load.

System build:
CPU/GPU: AMD Zacate APU – E350 (HD6310 graphics) @ 1.88ghz
Graphics: Sapphire HD5670 FleX Edition
Motherboard: Asus E35M1-I Deluxe Motherboard
Chassis: Thermaltake Armor A30
Memory: Corsair Dominator DDR3 (4GB)
Hard Drive: Samsung 3.5 inch 2TB
Power Supply: Zalman ZM500-HP Heatpipe Cooled 500W.

Supplemental Hardware:
Solid State: Kingston Hyper Max 3.0 x 2
Optical: Asus USB 2.0 BluRay Drive
Monitors: Sharp 50 inch 1080p Aquos LCD TV, LaCie 730 (IQ testing), Dell U2410, ilyama Prolite E2472HDD x2, ilyama Prolite B2712HDS.

Software:
Windows 7 64 Bit
Catalyst 11.2
ArcSoft Media Converter 7
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra V10
HQV Benchmark V 2.0
Left4Dead
Far Cry 2
Resident Evil 5

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Kill A Watt Meter

All results are gained from multiple test runs to ensure any abnormalities are removed before publication.

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